I think the problem isn't that people were doing spreadsheets, but that they weren't given the full data to work with. The planned event XP wasn't disclosed at the start, so it didn't end up in those calculations, which made the rewards seem a lot worse than Blizzard had intended.
The new system seems to be more generous for casual and semi-casual players, but the people who used to grind for 30G per 3 wins are off slightly worse and those people are heavily invested into Hearthstone and therefore very vocal. For me, the new system means I have to play a bit more to complete both the daily and weekly quests, but I get more gold in the end. Even after buying the mini-expansion with gold I'm on track to have enough gold for the next expansion if it launches late March or early April.
The problem with Jade Druid wasn't in the power level of the deck, but in what it did to the meta. Any slow deck would lose to Jade Druid, any fast deck would lose to Pirate Warrior, so that left very few viable decks. I found Dragon Priest as a mid-range deck that stood up okay against those two, so I played mostly that, but if Un'goro hadn't shaken up the meta I'd probably have quit the game.
Kibler has been asking for a rotating core set for years, so if they put him next to the game director, it's very likely going to be about the future of Classic.
I've played Xanesh in Constructed and drawing it late wasn't really an issue: the deck is still playable without the discounts. The games that I lost were because I didn't draw/discover enough AoE vs aggro; whether I had Xanesh in hand didn't make a difference in those games.
Droplet of Insanity had its mind set on world domination today, giving me already-corrupted Carnival Clown twice, which was really good. I wonder if it's possible to just put the Clown in the deck from the start, maybe using Dark Inquisitor Xanesh and Insight to make it easier to corrupt.
Yeah, it's weird to hear him say that after they have just added a layer of indirection to the economy. Maybe that's why they had more packs on the rewards track at first, but that wasn't welcomed by players because players like to get all the important cards early in the season and from there on save up for the next expansion.
Trying to get the most value out of your resources (cards, mana, life) is part of the game itself, so people who enjoy Hearthstone probably find figuring out how they can efficiently spend their gold and dust a challenge rather than a chore.
Looking at the current Wild debate, it still sounds like they don't quite know what to make of the mode.
There seem to be two main opinions: one group wants Wild to be a place where you can play your old favorite decks, while another group wants Wild to be a balanced meta with its own unique decks. I get the impression though that the first group mainly plays Standard and the second group mainly plays Wild.
I'm still amazed just how bad they are at monetizing Battlegrounds. It could so easily work with cosmetics - skins, emotes, boards, hero power fluff. And it's something many games out there do well. But Blizzard barely does it, aside from the early way too overpriced attempts or as bundle bonuses.
This is a problem with Hearthstone in general: even if you are willing to spend money, a lot of what they sell is so expensive for what you get that it doesn't feel like a good deal to actually buy it. For example, if I knew that every pack I bought would add a new card to my collection, I would be buying more packs. But a lot of packs will be 40 dust instead.
It's a typical mobile business model: make lots of money from a small group of players (whales), instead of trying to make less money per player from a larger group of players. It might not last though if anti-lootbox regulations are adopted in the coming years, so it would be wise for Blizzard to improve ways of monetizing Hearthstone besides packs.
I dropped Blessing of the Ancients to a single copy, because I also found it was often stuck in my hand until the lethal turn. Perhaps a second Solar Eclipse can replace the remaining copy.
I wouldnt call it cheating, since the bad coding allows it, but i would soon look for if it hurts their viewership, i would not watch a streamer who constantly skips the combat, the tavern turn is not that exciting.
I wouldn't call it cheating either, but that's more for pragmatic reasons (I wouldn't want Blizzard to start banning people who often disconnect) than out of principle (the players are doing something outside of the game interface that gives them an advantage). On the other hand, players could just close and restart the client instead, which would save a bit less time, but still skips the battle without using any outside help.
One thing that Hearthstone got right is that the server makes all the decisions and the client only displays them. This makes actual cheating near impossible: someone would either have to crack the server or find some sequence of plays that makes the game unplayable on the opponent's client. The latter did happen a few times, but not often and the problems were fixed quickly.
However, Hearthstone also has a history of detailed and long animations. While detailed is good, the length can be a problem. In Constructed, clicking a played card on the left of the screen dismisses it, speeding up that part of the animation a bit, but animations on the board can still be agonizingly slow. In Battlegrounds, the entire battle is essentially a chain of animations, since determining the outcome is done in a fraction of a second.
With that said, it, and the achievements, kinda showed the "flaw" in the system, or rather the way it works: when the combat starts, before you can even see the board, the game already decided on all the moves and who wins or loses that fight. You can only watch the motions. It can still give you that rush of pulling off a lucky victory, but if you know everything has been already predetermined, that feeling gets quite sour.
Im not a developer, so cant speak for if and how it could be changed, but having the combat phase be literally irrelevant, that does not bring me much enjoyment from player perspective. With that said, i still like to play BG, but i would enjoy it more, if the combat phase mattered at all. I still get angry/happy about the result, so i guess the brain can be fooled even if you know what is going on, oh well.
I am a developer and the problem is more fundamental than you might think. Actually, there are two separate things going on here:
whether the battle outcome is predetermined
whether the client knows the battle outcome before the player does
Despite their name, Random Number Generators aren't actually random, they just create a sequence of unpredictable numbers. But given the same initial state, the seed, the RNG will produce the same sequence of numbers every time it runs. It's possible to re-seed an RNG from actually random sources, like timestamps from user inputs and network packets arriving, but since those sources of true randomness are limited, they're usually only tapped for generating secure random numbers, used in encryption keys for example.
But even if they re-seeded the RNG with a true random seed, that wouldn't change the game in any way from the player's perspective: if the server can run the battle in milliseconds, the outcome is still fixed long before the player knows the result. If you can't tell the difference between a predetermined outcome and a truly random one, does that difference even matter?
I think the solution would be in addressing the second problem: the mismatch between the time that the client knows the outcome and the time the player knows it. One way would be to have a fast forward and/or skip button in the client during the battle. That way, every player would have the option to have more turn time by not watching the animations, not only the tech savvy. I think this is also more fair, because different players are paired up in each round and one battle can take a lot longer to animate than another.
Alternatively, the server could drip-feed the RNG outcomes to the client, so reconnecting would not skip any part of the battle. But that's a lot harder to implement, since the server would have to be able to predict all the animation times, so it knows when to send which part of the battle report. Given the history of bugs caused by server and client state being out of sync (minions changing position on the board, spellburst icon missing), I think it's safer if they avoid this approach.
I think they realized they made a mistake with the initial release of Battlegrounds: they had a popular new game mode, but very little reason for people to spend money on it.
I don't mind that a player's collection matters: it's a collectible card game after all. But what doesn't feel right is that they have two separate access restrictions: you need Wild cards for building the initial deck and you need a lot of cards from the latest sets to unlock treasures. In particular the latter feels very artificial: having to own a card to put it in a deck is something people are familiar with from physical card games, but having to own a certain number of cards to unlock an entirely unrelated card feels contrived.
Long-time F2P-ers that kept their Wild collection can probably play Duels just fine. I'm not F2P, but I do have a very limited budget for Hearthstone and I had to craft two epics to meet the original treasure requirements, which were lowered since. The problem is that a lot of people on a budget disenchanted their cards on rotation and with the terrible 4:1 dust ratio re-crafting them is too expensive. That ratio was a reason for me not to disenchant my Wild cards and instead play both Standard and Wild, but a lot of people chose to play only Standard instead.
Blizzard actively made Wild feel like a lesser game mode than Standard:
At first, you couldn't buy Wild packs at all, then for a while you could only buy them on the web site and not in the client and only recently they can be bought from the client again.
Balance changes in Wild only happen when things are really broken and even then can take a very long time. This has improved over the years, but that's true for Standard as well, so Wild still receives less attention.
In the Play menu, if you select a Wild deck, the client will offer you to convert it to Standard, instead of offering to switch to Wild mode or just starting matchmaking in Wild mode.
I remember one big Wild tournament ever, while there are several a year plus Grand Masters for Standard.
So all the messaging from Blizzard suggested that Wild cards were not worth keeping if you're interested in the latest developments in Hearthstone.
I agree that balance is the main problem with Duels at the moment. The access requirements are also a problem, but even many people who can get in don't stick around.
Because the treasures (especially passives) are so crazy, getting a good one or one that fits your deck well makes a huge difference. And getting bad buckets makes your deck worse. Even okay buckets can make your deck worse, since they're diluting your best cards (treasures and key cards from the initial deck); often the best pick is "No more, please!" when that's offered. Loot is more fun when it's actually usable.
This problem with treasures and buckets having a big impact on your success existed in Dungeon Run as well, but it didn't feel as bad because the opponents were bosses, not equals. In Duels, the further you progress, the more you'll face opponents that high-rolled, which feels unfair since they're players just like you.
Ah yes, the cards were revealed but their IDs were not.
It's fine: although I can't wait to import new decks, literally I can wait of course. When all the (arcane?) dust has settled, it would be nice to report unknown cards with a more specific error message though.
But the chances for duplicates of Races cards are smaller then. It's more likely to get an extra copy of a normal DMF card because there are more of them. The only risk I see is to get one of the new Legendaries before buying the set.
If you get two copies of a common, you gain 70 dust. For one rare, you gain 80 dust. But if you draw an epic or legendary, you risk getting a duplicate instead of a potentially useful DMF epic or legendary, which sets you back by 300 or 1200 dust respectively.
If you're only looking for very specific epics and legendaries, gaming the system like that might be worth it. But if you're trying to build a broad collection you might be better off by making use of the duplicate protection and opening DMF packs after getting the expansion.
Maybe if you play a lot of Arena and you're going to open packs anyway the math is different, but if you're buying packs with gold or real money, the mini expansion seems to be better value than Darkmoon packs.
And whether a card is worth it depends on the player: I like building decks, so even if a card isn't in a tier 1 deck, it can be worth having if it's unique or it enables an archetype that isn't tier 1.
When I first saw Conjure Mana Biscuit, I thought it was really strong because banking mana is very useful, but then I realized that it does cost a card from your deck.
It's like a mix between Far Sight and pre-nerf Innervate, but the biscuit lacks the draw of Far Sight while it requires an up-front mana investment that Innervate does not. So while it is similar to two good cards, it also has the down sides of both of those cards combined.
It might see play in Mana Cyclone decks or in OTK decks, but it won't be an auto-include for mages, I think.
There are 14 unique rares though, so 28 rare cards to collect. That alone will likely take more than $15 or 2000G worth of packs. Unless you're not interested in the majority of rares either?
Personally, I think many of the revealed cards are at least interesting enough to try and build decks with, so I'll probably buy the full set for 2000G.
I think the problem isn't that people were doing spreadsheets, but that they weren't given the full data to work with. The planned event XP wasn't disclosed at the start, so it didn't end up in those calculations, which made the rewards seem a lot worse than Blizzard had intended.
The new system seems to be more generous for casual and semi-casual players, but the people who used to grind for 30G per 3 wins are off slightly worse and those people are heavily invested into Hearthstone and therefore very vocal. For me, the new system means I have to play a bit more to complete both the daily and weekly quests, but I get more gold in the end. Even after buying the mini-expansion with gold I'm on track to have enough gold for the next expansion if it launches late March or early April.
The problem with Jade Druid wasn't in the power level of the deck, but in what it did to the meta. Any slow deck would lose to Jade Druid, any fast deck would lose to Pirate Warrior, so that left very few viable decks. I found Dragon Priest as a mid-range deck that stood up okay against those two, so I played mostly that, but if Un'goro hadn't shaken up the meta I'd probably have quit the game.
Shadowbomber is good versus spells or slower decks, but it does lose versus pogos and other fast minion-based decks.
Kibler has been asking for a rotating core set for years, so if they put him next to the game director, it's very likely going to be about the future of Classic.
I've played Xanesh in Constructed and drawing it late wasn't really an issue: the deck is still playable without the discounts. The games that I lost were because I didn't draw/discover enough AoE vs aggro; whether I had Xanesh in hand didn't make a difference in those games.
Droplet of Insanity had its mind set on world domination today, giving me already-corrupted Carnival Clown twice, which was really good. I wonder if it's possible to just put the Clown in the deck from the start, maybe using Dark Inquisitor Xanesh and Insight to make it easier to corrupt.
I encountered one Paladin after another tonight, but it was all Librams (EU Gold).
Yeah, it's weird to hear him say that after they have just added a layer of indirection to the economy. Maybe that's why they had more packs on the rewards track at first, but that wasn't welcomed by players because players like to get all the important cards early in the season and from there on save up for the next expansion.
Trying to get the most value out of your resources (cards, mana, life) is part of the game itself, so people who enjoy Hearthstone probably find figuring out how they can efficiently spend their gold and dust a challenge rather than a chore.
There seem to be two main opinions: one group wants Wild to be a place where you can play your old favorite decks, while another group wants Wild to be a balanced meta with its own unique decks. I get the impression though that the first group mainly plays Standard and the second group mainly plays Wild.
This is a problem with Hearthstone in general: even if you are willing to spend money, a lot of what they sell is so expensive for what you get that it doesn't feel like a good deal to actually buy it. For example, if I knew that every pack I bought would add a new card to my collection, I would be buying more packs. But a lot of packs will be 40 dust instead.
It's a typical mobile business model: make lots of money from a small group of players (whales), instead of trying to make less money per player from a larger group of players. It might not last though if anti-lootbox regulations are adopted in the coming years, so it would be wise for Blizzard to improve ways of monetizing Hearthstone besides packs.
I dropped Blessing of the Ancients to a single copy, because I also found it was often stuck in my hand until the lethal turn. Perhaps a second Solar Eclipse can replace the remaining copy.
This is my current version:
I wouldn't call it cheating either, but that's more for pragmatic reasons (I wouldn't want Blizzard to start banning people who often disconnect) than out of principle (the players are doing something outside of the game interface that gives them an advantage). On the other hand, players could just close and restart the client instead, which would save a bit less time, but still skips the battle without using any outside help.
One thing that Hearthstone got right is that the server makes all the decisions and the client only displays them. This makes actual cheating near impossible: someone would either have to crack the server or find some sequence of plays that makes the game unplayable on the opponent's client. The latter did happen a few times, but not often and the problems were fixed quickly.
However, Hearthstone also has a history of detailed and long animations. While detailed is good, the length can be a problem. In Constructed, clicking a played card on the left of the screen dismisses it, speeding up that part of the animation a bit, but animations on the board can still be agonizingly slow. In Battlegrounds, the entire battle is essentially a chain of animations, since determining the outcome is done in a fraction of a second.
I am a developer and the problem is more fundamental than you might think. Actually, there are two separate things going on here:
Despite their name, Random Number Generators aren't actually random, they just create a sequence of unpredictable numbers. But given the same initial state, the seed, the RNG will produce the same sequence of numbers every time it runs. It's possible to re-seed an RNG from actually random sources, like timestamps from user inputs and network packets arriving, but since those sources of true randomness are limited, they're usually only tapped for generating secure random numbers, used in encryption keys for example.
But even if they re-seeded the RNG with a true random seed, that wouldn't change the game in any way from the player's perspective: if the server can run the battle in milliseconds, the outcome is still fixed long before the player knows the result. If you can't tell the difference between a predetermined outcome and a truly random one, does that difference even matter?
I think the solution would be in addressing the second problem: the mismatch between the time that the client knows the outcome and the time the player knows it. One way would be to have a fast forward and/or skip button in the client during the battle. That way, every player would have the option to have more turn time by not watching the animations, not only the tech savvy. I think this is also more fair, because different players are paired up in each round and one battle can take a lot longer to animate than another.
Alternatively, the server could drip-feed the RNG outcomes to the client, so reconnecting would not skip any part of the battle. But that's a lot harder to implement, since the server would have to be able to predict all the animation times, so it knows when to send which part of the battle report. Given the history of bugs caused by server and client state being out of sync (minions changing position on the board, spellburst icon missing), I think it's safer if they avoid this approach.
I think they realized they made a mistake with the initial release of Battlegrounds: they had a popular new game mode, but very little reason for people to spend money on it.
I don't mind that a player's collection matters: it's a collectible card game after all. But what doesn't feel right is that they have two separate access restrictions: you need Wild cards for building the initial deck and you need a lot of cards from the latest sets to unlock treasures. In particular the latter feels very artificial: having to own a card to put it in a deck is something people are familiar with from physical card games, but having to own a certain number of cards to unlock an entirely unrelated card feels contrived.
Long-time F2P-ers that kept their Wild collection can probably play Duels just fine. I'm not F2P, but I do have a very limited budget for Hearthstone and I had to craft two epics to meet the original treasure requirements, which were lowered since. The problem is that a lot of people on a budget disenchanted their cards on rotation and with the terrible 4:1 dust ratio re-crafting them is too expensive. That ratio was a reason for me not to disenchant my Wild cards and instead play both Standard and Wild, but a lot of people chose to play only Standard instead.
Blizzard actively made Wild feel like a lesser game mode than Standard:
So all the messaging from Blizzard suggested that Wild cards were not worth keeping if you're interested in the latest developments in Hearthstone.
I agree that balance is the main problem with Duels at the moment. The access requirements are also a problem, but even many people who can get in don't stick around.
Because the treasures (especially passives) are so crazy, getting a good one or one that fits your deck well makes a huge difference. And getting bad buckets makes your deck worse. Even okay buckets can make your deck worse, since they're diluting your best cards (treasures and key cards from the initial deck); often the best pick is "No more, please!" when that's offered. Loot is more fun when it's actually usable.
This problem with treasures and buckets having a big impact on your success existed in Dungeon Run as well, but it didn't feel as bad because the opponents were bosses, not equals. In Duels, the further you progress, the more you'll face opponents that high-rolled, which feels unfair since they're players just like you.
Ah yes, the cards were revealed but their IDs were not.
It's fine: although I can't wait to import new decks, literally I can wait of course. When all the (arcane?) dust has settled, it would be nice to report unknown cards with a more specific error message though.
Thanks for the hard work!
I'm trying to import the following deck code in the Deck Builder, but all I get is server errors (HTTP 500):
AAECAbSKAwb9Au0Dr6ID+bUDltEDiuADDPcD5gXDlAPKnAPTnAP8rQP/rQPlugPvugObzgO50gOM5AMA
If you get two copies of a common, you gain 70 dust. For one rare, you gain 80 dust. But if you draw an epic or legendary, you risk getting a duplicate instead of a potentially useful DMF epic or legendary, which sets you back by 300 or 1200 dust respectively.
If you're only looking for very specific epics and legendaries, gaming the system like that might be worth it. But if you're trying to build a broad collection you might be better off by making use of the duplicate protection and opening DMF packs after getting the expansion.
Maybe if you play a lot of Arena and you're going to open packs anyway the math is different, but if you're buying packs with gold or real money, the mini expansion seems to be better value than Darkmoon packs.
And whether a card is worth it depends on the player: I like building decks, so even if a card isn't in a tier 1 deck, it can be worth having if it's unique or it enables an archetype that isn't tier 1.
When I first saw Conjure Mana Biscuit, I thought it was really strong because banking mana is very useful, but then I realized that it does cost a card from your deck.
It's like a mix between Far Sight and pre-nerf Innervate, but the biscuit lacks the draw of Far Sight while it requires an up-front mana investment that Innervate does not. So while it is similar to two good cards, it also has the down sides of both of those cards combined.
It might see play in Mana Cyclone decks or in OTK decks, but it won't be an auto-include for mages, I think.
There are 14 unique rares though, so 28 rare cards to collect. That alone will likely take more than $15 or 2000G worth of packs. Unless you're not interested in the majority of rares either?
Personally, I think many of the revealed cards are at least interesting enough to try and build decks with, so I'll probably buy the full set for 2000G.